AppleLisa-CommentaryTESLER

Apple Lisa Computer Commentary
Larry Tesler • 28 November 2000

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lOJuly 2003

Tales from Tessler: History of the Lisa Computer

Larry Tesler, former Xerox PARC researcher and Apple chief scientist
explains the impact of the Lisa, a computer ahead of its time.

By Larry Tesler, C EO Stagecast

Apple introduced the revolutionary Lisa computer in 1983, but only about 30,000 were
sold. The productwas overpriced and slow. It also entered the marketon the heels of the
popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, which established the IBM PC as the standard in
business. But this did n't stop the Lisa from pointing the way to the future of personal
computing.

Why was the Lisa slow?

Because itdidn't have enough power to run the demanding graphical user interface.
Here's how it compares to my G4 Cube:

Lisal

PowerMac G4 Cube|

Processor

5 MHz 1 6/32 bit

450 MHz 32 bit

Maximum Memory

2MB

1 ,500MB

Standard disk

0.8MB Floppy

20,000MB Ultra ATA

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Even that low-power setup was too expensive to compete with an MS-DOS PC, which had
a quarter of the memory and an 8-bit microprocessor.

What Survives from Apple's Lisa?

Although Lisa came and went almost in the blink of an eye, many of its features are still
found in today's Windows PCs and Macintosh computers.

Lisa's Pioneering Features

A menu bar with pull-down menus and identified keyboard shortcuts
File menu commands named New, Open, Close, Save, Save as, and Print
Windows and icons moved by pointing, clicking, and dragging
Dialog boxes with radio buttons, check boxes, and OK/Cancel buttons
Alert boxes to provide warnings and explain errors

Lisa innovations incorporated into the 1984 Macintosh included those listed above, plus:

Hardware

• The one-button mouse

• The ImageWriter WYSIWYG ("whatyou see is whatyou get") printer

User interface

• A menu bar spanning the top of the screen

• Windows that visually zoom when they open and close

• The appearance and layout of scroll bars and the window resize corner

• Rounded-corner buttons in dialogs

Application software

• LisaProject, the first such application that allowed the user to drag task boxes
to change the schedule (became MacProject)
LisaDraw (became MacDraw)
LisaWrite (word-processing)
LisaCalc (a spreadsheet)
LisaGraph (a charting program)
LisaTerminal (a Telnet-like program)
LisaList (a simple data base program)

The Lisa Desktop Manager influenced the design of the Macintosh Finder.
Lisa's printing software heavily influenced the original Mac equivalent.

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How PARC Influenced the Lisa

Lisa was notthe beginning of this graphical revolution. Many of the ideas in the Lisa were
inspired by previous work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

PARC's innovations

The Ethernet

The laser printer

The personal computer with a mouse and bit-mapped (pixel-based) graphics

WYSIWYG editing of memos, email, illustrations, and animations

Menu commands named Cut, Copy, and Paste

Overlapped windows with scroll bars

Multi-frame browsing windows

Some of the PARC work was first commercialized in the Xerox Star, a 1981 client-server
system that anticipated the Sun workstation. Star workstations featured a two-button
mouse. The user interface introduced many innovations, including desktop icons and
property dialogs.

The Star directly influenced Microsoft Windows. As in Windows 1.0, windows on the Star
were tiled instead of overlapped. Although the Star appeared too late to have much
influence on the Lisa, its use of desktop icons put pressure on Apple to adopt an iconic
desktop. The Lisa team had prototyped this desktop but had not planned to ship it.

Much of PARC's work was in turn inspired by prior research, especially that of Doug
Engelbart, whose group at SRI developed the mouse, hypertext linking, shared
teleconferencing, outline editors, and much more.

Learn More About Apple's Lisa

Download Lisa documentation and Lisa Software. The software won't do you much good
unless you have Lisa hardware. But there is a longstanding project to develop a Lisa
emulator.

More Lisa links

• The Computer Museum History Center

• The Museum of Dead, Gone, and Obsolete Computers

• Unofficial Apple History

Originally posted November 28, 2000

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